Automated and semi-automated machines have been employed for processing documents such as bulk mail. Due to the large quantity of mail received by many companies, there has long been a need for efficient processing of incoming mail. Document sorting has become particularly important in the area of remittance processing.
Utility companies, phone companies, and credit card companies routinely receive thousands of payment envelopes from their customers on a daily basis. Typically, a customer payment envelope contains an invoice stub and some type of customer payment, usually in the form of a bank check or money order. Fully automated systems automatically open such mail, extracts the contents, sort the contents and scan the contents to obtain image data for each document in the contents.
Frequently, the envelopes received in the incoming mail have varying characteristics. For instance, the height, length and thickness of the envelopes may vary. Many fully automated mail processing systems are unable to process such mail so it is outsorted for manual processing. It is desirable to provide a system to efficiently process such mail and obtain image data for such documents.
In accordance with the present invention, an apparatus and method are provided for processing mail that can accommodate a batch of mail containing envelopes having different characteristics.